and with resignation. She had put up an equally determined fight
against age, and it was only when the remorseless calendar proved
her to be sixty-five that she resigned from the struggle, washed the
dye out of her hair and the make-up from her face and retired to
that old house. Not even then, however, did she resign from all
activity and remain contented to sit with her hands in her lap and
prepare herself for the next world. This one still held a certain
amount of joy, and she concentrated all the vitality that remained
with her to the perfect running of her house. At eleven o'clock
every morning the tap of her stick on the polished floors was the
signal of her arrival, and if every man and woman of the menage was
not actively at work, she knew the reason why. Her tongue was still
as sharp as the blade of a razor, and for sloppiness she had no
mercy. Careless maids trembled before her tirades, and strong men
shook in their shoes under her biting phrases. At seventy, with her
snowy hair, little face that had gone into as many lines as a dried
pippin, bent, fragile body and tiny hands twisted by rheumatism, she
looked like one of the old women in a Grimm's fairy tale who
frightened children and scared animals and turned giants into
cowards.

She drew up in front of the frustrated girl, stretched out her white
hand lined with blue veins and began to tap her on the shoulder--
announcing in that irritating manner that she had a complaint to
make.

"My dear," she said, "when you write letters to your little friends
or your sentimental mother, bear in mind that the place for ink is
on the note paper and not on the carpet."